Have too much (used) oil in your hands? Make it all into soap!

Disclaimer: Some references made here may be incomprehensible to you, as they mostly constitute inside jokes. But read on, anyway! 😀

Since we embarked on this project in March, Project GREASE has come a looooong way, leaving a nice GREASEy trail of accomplishments (even though we’re saying so ourselves, we do take pride in our work!). Our biggest, and proudest yet, would be our recent emergence as MIDDLE DIVISION CHAMPIONS for the Australian FPS Finals in Melbourne this year!

*Project GREASE members bow demurely*

Thank you, we appreciate the polite applause. Now let us begin our extremely moving thank-you speech. While we are extremely grateful to each and every fellow teammate for channeling her heart and soul into this project – staying back late in school to ‘chiong’ CmPS every day even though the portentous EYAs were looming, postponing all post-EYA celebrations to religiously meet for hours on end to complete the scrapbook/video/display board/booth materials, burning the midnight oil, forgoing sleep altogether, or conducting impromptu sleepovers at teammates’ houses just to finish what we’d started – it must not be forgotten that there are other individuals around whose help we are, sincerely, eternally grateful for and indebted to, and without whom we would never have come this far. This post, as its category aptly suggests, honours the efforts of 3 very special teacher mentors, whereby how far we have come can be fully credited to their patience, guidance and painstaking efforts.

*Project GREASE members start sobbing into their hankies*

They are none other than –

(drumroll, please.)

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1) Miss Tan Beng Chiak!!

(disclaimer: actual image of Miss Tan is currently unavailable. We apologize for the rather inaccurate representation above, but it is as close as we can get to her kindly smiling face :))

We, Project GREASE, sincerely thank Miss Tan for all her invaluable help and support in our project from the very beginning! If not for her pushing us to be more daring in our soap-making ventures, we probably would only have accomplished that much, experiment-wise; if not for her help in vetting through our proposal for the MOE cluster fund, we probably wouldn’t have succeeded in our application (little did we know, then, how essential this fund has proved to be!); if not for her linking us up with Drama Box, we probably wouldn’t have had a door opened to so many precious outreach opportunities, such as Project Mending Sky (PMS), our first major outreach to the masses.

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And now, for the second Very Important Person Project GREASE has to thank!

GUESS WHO!

(match the Crocs to their owner!)

Yes, you guessed right, it is She On Your Right (and our left) –

2) Ms May Tan!!

Ahh, speak of Ms Tan, and graphic images of minced meat promptly creeps into many a GREASEy member’s mind. We highly doubt Ms Tan will ever be “kaypoh” or “wuliao” enough to google her own name (which most of us cannot say the same for ourselves :P) – not that she’ll ever be free to do so anyway – thus rendering the chances of her reading this highly unlikely. As such, we shall not “mince [our] words” when we officially thank her for what she has done for us! 😀

Despite the insurmountable mountains of work waiting for her on her desk everyday, as a dedicated teaching staff of the Chemistry Department and doubly as the ever-dutiful Research Studies HOD, Ms Tan has nevertheless gone all out to lend us invaluable tips and advice to improve our formal documents essential for the Australian Finals and, on a whole, trained us to become more efficient, effective and eloquent “thinkers, leaders and pioneeeeeers” as good ambassadors of our school. Our report, for instance, has gone under her critical eye (aptly suiting the expression “gone under the knife”!) for no less than a whopping 9 versions in a short span of 10 days! She, who self-deprecatingly self-proclaims herself to be quite the “slavedriver” and the “bad guy” all at once, have kept the report i/cs of Project GREASE on their toes (and drooping eyebags) for the last ten days before the submission of the report, tirelessly scrutinizing and dissecting version after version in search of any possible semblance of a bone of contention.

Project GREASE is extremely grateful to Ms Tan’s patience and painstaking effort to assist us in any way that it is in her power to do so, even accepting calls and flustered smses from immature, uninspiring team members at unearthly hours of the night to dish out advice about display boards (and their backsides). She has even, on one occasion one day before the official deadline, voluntarily vetted our report despite being overseas in Taipei. We have upon occasion, through our official teacher-mentor Mrs Lee (for it takes some superhuman effort to hold the former’s gaze unflinchingly for more than 5 seconds, much less pop a question hardly relevant to CmPS), not-so-seriously inquired how we can ever repay Ms Tan for her kindness and generosity, and in return, she has sort-of-seriously replied that we can mop her house every week, which, erm, we will kinda-sorta-maybe-seriously consider, and, for the time being, gladly classify under Project GREASE’s neverending to-do list of “future plans”. When we eventually figure out how to use that alkaline ball as an alternative for sodium hydroxide, Project GREASE will personally use our newly-improved soap bars to clean her floors until they are as shiny as mirrors!

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And now, the Last But Not Least. Lo and behold!

Mrs Lee playing peek-a-boo. No, actually she’s just being modest.

3) Mrs Lee Lim-Chyn!!

A more flattering photo of our beloved teacher-mentor, with fellow CmPS coach Ms Mariette Ong on her left

Project GREASE thanks Mrs Lee for being the best teacher-mentor ever! (: We sincerely, from the very bottom of our hearts right down to our stomachs, thank her for the sheer amount of time and effort channelled into not only making this project a better one, but also nurturing us wholistically to be better people. Despite her alarming workload as a teacher from the Biology department, as well as the dedicated Head of Department for Admission, she has nonetheless been the ever-patient, ever-efficient and ever-responsible teacher mentor, ever-ready to dish out insightful advice and share with us interesting anecdotes and experiences to lighten the atmosphere. One such fondly-recollected moment would be the 2 priceless hours before the interview during the Australian FPS Finals, whereby instead of fervently preparing for what was to come, we were instead sitting around in a circle on the vast, green fields, listening voraciously to Mrs Lee sharing her previous experiences as a teacher in Jintai secondary where she, left-brainer and all, actually taught English Literature! :O

Project GREASE and Mrs Lee basking in the sun moments before interview

Project GREASE has learnt much from Mrs Lee throughout the course of this project, and are especially impressed by her admirable project management skills – her artistic inclinations (“It’s suuuuuuper ugly!”), her practicality (“One teabag for THREE people?!”) and her insightfulness (“You’d better give me the first cup!”) in guiding us, even though it is her first year leading a CmPS group. More than that, we are extremely appreciative of her commitment to this project as our official teacher-mentor, and are sincerely grateful for all the time and effort she has channelled into making this project, and its members, a better ones.

We, Project GREASE, fully acknowledge that we are, on a whole, not an easy team to manage, given the demanding nature of our project and our team’s sometimes over-conscientiousness, over-ambition and even obsessive-compulsive tendencies. We are extremely grateful to Mrs Lee for not only steering us in the right direction in times of doubt, but also particularly for being caring enough, as a person, to seriously point out certain flaws and straighten out certain issues or obstacles that we irrevocably had to face along the tumultuous course of our GREASEy ventures. There are times where we have unintentionally rendered her “heartborken” (spelling error intended) from the immature nature of the errors we have made, but she has forgiven us time and again, and for this we are extremely grateful.

If asked about our teacher-mentor, members of Project GREASE will affectionately describe her as one of a thoughtful, peaceful disposition who has never liked the idea of “competiting” with others, preferring to learn from opponents than see them as official competitors. We are, above all, extremely grateful to her support and genuine concern for, not just the project itself, but each and every individual that makes up Project GREASE.

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Project GREASE is extremely lucky to have the help and support (such mundane words cannot truly convey the extent of our gratitude, but we are so awed by their contributions that we are at a loss for better vocabulary) these 3 wonderful people have made for us. We hope that we will continue to have their help and support (ditto the italics) in our near-future endeavours, especially in the International Conference held in Michigan next year.

Then again, without the outstanding contributions of these three awesome people, there would be no International Conference to speak of for us greasy people. Thank you so much, Miss Tan BC, Ms MTan and Mrs Lee; we won’t let you down!! (:

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